Appointing to Govern: Party Patronage in Europe

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12159
• Date: 01 January 2014
• Author: Michelangelo Vercesi
• Published date: 01 January 2014

Book Reviews 131

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 74, Iss. 1, pp. 131–133. © 2013 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12159.

Michelangelo Vercesi is a

postdoctoral scholar in the Center for

the Study of Democracy, Leuphana

University Lüneburg. He holds a doctorate

in political science from the University of

Pavia and has studied at the University of

Vienna. His main research interests are

comparative government, political elites,

coalition politics, and Italian politics. He has

published articles in peer-reviewed journals

such as Government and Opposition,

Contemporary Italian Politics, and

Quaderni di scienza politica.

E-mail: michelangelo.vercesi@unipv.it

Sonia M. Ospina and Rogan Kersh, Editors

Michelangelo Vercesi

Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany

Petr Kopecký, Peter Mair, and Maria Spirova, eds.,

Party Patronage and Party Government in Euro-

pean Democracies (Oxford, UK: Oxford University

Press, 2012). xvi, 415 pp. $110.00 (cloth), ISBN:

9780199599370.

Fabrizio Di Mascio, Partiti e stato in Italia: Le nomine

pubbliche tra clientelismo e spoils system (Bologna,

Italy: Il Mulino, 2012). 271 pp. €26.00, ISBN:

9788815237453.

Modern democracies are party democra-

cies. Parties can be more (e.g., traditional

European mass parties) or less (e.g., U.S.

parties) structured.  ey can be tightly linked to

society or to a specif‌i c societal segment, or they can

reproduce the traits of the so-called cartel party

model. Whatever the dif‌f erences, parties are the actors

that make representative democracies work.

From this viewpoint, party patronage is a quite

neglected topic. Patronage is usually conceived as a

form of compensation for a party’s favors (mostly

electoral support), and journalist-chronicled exam-

ples are rife across developed and developing party

systems alike. Yet scholars of party government more

frequently focus on the modes of selection of politi-

cal rulers and on the behavior of party actors in the

executive branch, directing less attention to party

patronage as a vital aspect of governance.

A comprehensive and empirically updated book on

party patronage that attempts to redress this oversight

is, in principle, a warmly welcomed contribution. And

this is what Party Patronage and Party Government in

European Democracies, edited by Petr Kopecký, Peter

Mair, and Maria Spirova, seeks to be. In its structure,

it follows the classic pattern of many comparative

edited volumes.  e three editors provide the theoreti-

cal framework, lay out guidelines for the empirical

research, and draw summary conclusions. In between,

several country experts provide their contributions

across 15 chapters, each dedicated to one country.

Linking the two books under review, the author of

the Italian case has also written the second book

reviewed here. Notwithstanding the shared origin

with its “elder brother,” Partiti e stato in Italia (Parties

and State in Italy) is more than a mere spinof‌f ; rather,

it is a valuable ef‌f ort to provide a better understanding

of how political parties control institutions and the

extent to which they do so through public appoint-

ments in a country considered a textbook example

of patronage.  is relation between the two works is

enough to justify a common review. Let us take the

two books in turn, beginning with that by Kopecký,

Mair, and Spirova.

 e scope of Party Patronage testif‌i es to the large-scale

ef‌f ort behind it.  e book’s focus is not only on a

specif‌i c part of the European Continent; the range of

the countries goes from northern to southern, from

western to eastern, from older to newer democracies.1

 e f‌i rst chapter, by two of the editors (Kopecký and

Mair), poses the framework for analysis.  e authors

distinguish between party patronage as an organiza-

tional resource and patronage as an electoral resource

(clientelism and brokerage). What is at stake is the

f‌i rst kind of patronage. Patronage represents “a form

of institutional control or of institutional exploitation

that operates to the benef‌i t of the party organization.

. . . Patronage in this sense can best be considered as

[one of the forms of] party-state linkage[s], rather

than as a party-society linkage” (7–8). Simply, patron-

age is def‌i ned as “the power of political parties to

appoint people to positions in state institutions” (8),2

with its scope of inf‌l uence being the range of posi-

tions that are distributed.

 ree reasons extracted from the literature for expect-

ing more party patronage in this sense are singled out.

First, parties are now situated more in public of‌f‌i ces

and less in organizations of mass integration; they

behave, according to the famous expression of Ingrid

Van Biezen, as public utilities. In this view, patron-

age becomes a crucial resource for parties to anchor

themselves to the political system. Second, the decline

Appointing to Govern: Party Patronage in Europe